University of B.C. Prof. Marina Adshade, seated, and Assistant Prof. Yue Qian at UBC on Oct. 17. The pair will be among the speakers at an Oct. 25 event put on by UBC Robson Square about How Marriage Impacts Our Health and Happiness.Mike Bell / PNG

Most data says, yes, married folks thrive compared with singletons.

Does marriage make us happier and healthier?

“Anyone who thinks there is a definitive answer to this is naive,” said Marina Adshade, an economics professor at the University of B.C.

She and three other academics will speak as a panel organized by UBC at its Robson Square campus on Friday, called Happy Ever After? How Marriage Impacts our Health and Happiness.

Much research says married people are happier and healthier. For instance, Cardus, a pro marriage think-tank, in 2016 published Marriage is Good for your Health, which examined “more than 50 published, empirical studies on the correlation between marital status and health. An overwhelmingly large majority of the studies indicate that married couples are happier, healthier and live longer than those who are not married.”

But “people who choose to get married tend to be happier because they have a bigger social circle or they’re more financially stable,” said Adshade. “So it doesn’t necessarily mean that marriage is making them happier.”

Among the proliferation of pro-marriage data, Prof. Paul Dolan of the London School of Economics earlier this year released his latest book, Happy Ever After, showing the happiest population subgroup are women who have never married and never had children.

He went as far as to say married woman are “f—ing miserable.”

Dolan said research showed men are happier and healthier because they take fewer risks, earn more money and live longer than unmarried men, but that married women spend their lives caretaking men and die sooner than their unmarried counterparts, and are therefore not happier. A media storm ensued.

“We thought, what a great opportunity” to talk about relative happiness between singles and marrieds, considering “the unprecedented number of people who are single,” said Adshade, who is also moderator of the event, for which $10 tickets will be sold to the public. That includes the four presentations, a chance to ask questions of the panel and a reception afterward.

Adshade, as an economist, said married people accrue financial benefits, including the ability to rely on a spouse’s income during job loss, pregnancy and retirement, and spouses are more likely to look after each other’s health.

“But it’s not as if being married swaddles you in a healthy blanket,” she said.

She said all marriage research seems to have the underlying message that women shouldn’t delay marriage.

“Cloaked in the veil of academic research is the waggling finger that says you better get with this marriage thing really soon,” said Adshade, who is no longer married but hopes her two kids one day will be. “The media love to tell women how they should live.”

For instance, she said Newsweek magazine in a 1986 cover story pronounced that an educated woman over 40 has a better chance of getting killed by a terrorist than of getting married. That nugget was repeated and became part of modern day wisdom.

But 20 years later, the magazine retracted the article, admitting the conclusion was a misrepresentation of the data because it didn’t take into account women who chose to remain unmarried, and because the women surveyed were then only in their 30s.

Adshade said Dolan also admitted making a mistake because he erroneously suggested married women in one study were answering questions differently when their husbands were present in the room during the interviews. But Dolan stuck by his thesis, that singletons are happier than married women.

Yue Qian, an assistant sociology professor at UBC, will discuss the “changing landscape of marriage and discuss how our lives are affected by the changing rules of intimacy.”

She said it used to be marriage was the “only legitimate place to have sex and raise children,” but that’s no longer true. So she asks, “What do people hope to derive from marriage?”

Qian noted a survey of people in their 20s found that 90 per cent of them intended eventually to get married. But they would marry for different reasons than previous generations, who joined forces to selflessly raise a family together for the good of society.

“Today we have what scholars call individualized marriage,” she said. “They want marriage to help them become a better person. We actually expect our spouses to meet our personal needs.”

Qian said discussing the changing face of marriage is “very complex” and doesn’t mean “we want to go back to the 1950s, when women were expected to only stay at home and raise children.”

Other panelists include Mandy Len Catron, an adjunct professor in UBC’s creative writing program, who will discuss whether lives and communities are improved by long-term marriage. She will examine its “social costs … what’s lost when we make marriage the most central relationship in our culture.”

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